Photo Series Inspiration

Creating a body of work

Final Project: Photo Series

• For the Final Project, you must create a photo series of 7-10 images with a common theme, narrative, story or subject matter between them. You have complete freedom regarding subject matter and may utilize any skills or concepts covered in class. You will also write an Artist Statement (between 250 to 500 words ) to accompany this series and give viewers insight into your work.

• Your photo series will be printed and presented in a portfolio presentation folder. I will also accept the files digitally.

• The goals for this project are:• to learn how to create a cohesive, balanced body of work• to establish an online presence as well as a professional physical portfolio as means

to share your work with others• to apply the different creative and technical skills you have learned in this course

towards a new series of your own

Inspiration for the Photo Series

• This lecture will provide several examples of photographic series’ with a brief artist statement

• Also look for artists / styles / subject matters that inspire YOU specifically

• You may also review links to online photo magazines that feature photo essays / series on the class website carrieacosta.com/photo-class/

Taryn Simon

The Innocents

This series documents the stories of individuals across the country who served time for violent crimes they did not commit.  These works question photography’s use as eyewitness account, acknowledging that unjust convictions often result from a victim’s response to photographs and lineups in law enforcement’s identification process.

Taryn SimonCALVIN WASHINGTON C&E Motel, Room No. 24, Waco, Texas Where an informant claimed to have heard Washington confess. Served 13 years of a Life sentence for capital murder

Taryn Simon ROY CRINERAlibi location, Houston, Texas Wrongfully accused- Served 10 years of a 99-year sentence for Aggravated Sexual Assault 2002

Taryn SimonFREDERICK DAYE Alibi location, American Legion Post 310, San Diego, California Where 13 witnesses placed Daye at the time of the crime served 10 years of a life sentence for Rape, Kidnapping and Vehicle Theft, 2002

Taryn SimonLARRY MAYES Scene of arrest, The Royal Inn, Gary, Indiana Police found Mayes hiding beneath a mattress in this room Served 18.5 years of an 80-year sentence for Rape, Robbery and Unlawful Deviate Conduct, 2002

Taryn SimonWILLIAM GREGORY Wick's Parlor, Louiville, Kentucky With fiancée Vicki Kidwell, whom he dated prior to conviction Gregory was pool champion in prison. Served 7 years of a 70 year sentence for Rape and Burglary, 2002

Taryn Simon CHARLES IRVIN FAIN Scene of the crime, the Snake River, Melba, Idaho Served 18 years of a death sentence

Taryn SimonLARRY YOUNGBLOOD Alibi location, Tucson, Arizona With Alice Laitner, Youngblood's Girlfriend and alibi witness at trial. Served 8 years of a 10.5-year sentence for Sexual Assault, Kidnapping and Child Molestation, 2002

Taryn Simon RONALD JONES Scene of arrest, South Side, Chicago, Illinois Served 8 years of a Death sentence, 200

Taryn SimonTROY WEBB Scene of the crime, The Pines, Virginia Beach, Virginia Served 7 years of a 47-year sentence for Rape, Kidnapping and Robbery

Howard Henry Chen

Postcards From Home

Wide-angle ventures in fin-de-siècle Viet Nam.

Howard Henry Chen Postcards from Home

Howard Henry Chen Postcards from Home

Howard Henry Chen Postcards from Home

Howard Henry Chen Postcards from Home

Diego Yturbe

Bienvenido / Welcome

“Hospitality is a an ancient principle that modern times have intemperized. These four images are part of a series of 60 images called "Bienvenido / Welcome.” The series is a tribute to hospitality in different parts of the World. First it was Cuba, then Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Turkey, France and so on until my journey ended back in Mexico. It is a visual travel journey, an anthropological study of men´s hospitality to a stranger.”

Diego Yterbe Havana, Cuba

Diego Yterbe Lahore, Pakistan

Diego Yterbe Nepal, India

Diego Yterbe Oaxaca, Mexico

Tom Bamberger

Panoramics

Tom Bamberger’s digitally created panoramas are inspired by one question — how far can the horizon line of an image be convincingly extended? Attracted to inherently repetitious scenery — housing developments, farmland, highways, vineyards — Bamberger seamlessly extends these landscapes by drawing and repeating information from single negatives. By blurring the line between his digital alterations and the existing shape of the landscape, Bamberger questions the nature of repetition, arguing that there is little difference between, for example, DNA’s reproductive process in a forest or field and the computer cloning that his work depends on.

Tom Bamberger Dark Homes

Tom Bamberger Nick’s Trees

Tom Bamberger Shadow

Tom Bamberger Shadow

Richard Koenig

InsertsRichard Koenig’s ambivalent views are carefully crafted illusions that utilize the camera’s capability to produce optical tricks and the artist’s skillful layering of photographs onto a single plane. Often featuring an image of a private space or intimate moment inset within a public space, the resulting photographs evoke thoughts of our own private moments in the most generic and impersonal spaces—melding two frequently experienced conditions.

Richard Koenig

Pearl #1

Richard Koenig

Pearl #2

Richard Koenig

Pearl #3

Richard Koenig

Pearl #4

Andre Kertesz

On Reading

A series of photographs taken by Kertész in Romania, France, and the United States that spans his photographic career of over fifty years, illustrates the consistency and skill with which Kertész has photographed in this style. Through these poetic, and at times humorous, studies, Kertesz brings the solitary activity of reading to a new level, rife with humanistic touches. Sturdily balanced between geometric composition and playful observation, it is easy to understand how these glimpses of everyday people and places would come to influence the work of Brassaï and Cartier-Bresson.

Andre Kertesz Chairs of Paris

Andre Kertesz Nara, 1968

Andre Kertesz

Greenwich Village, NY

Andre Kertesz

Paris, France

Andre Kertesz Manila, 1968

Andre Kertesz James in study

Jin Lee

WindLee's Wind series and Prairie (Four Season) series are the result of Lee exploring and closely examining the tallgrass prairie preserves of Northern and Central Illinois. With a twin-lens, medium format camera, she carefully framed and recorded the intrinsic, natural phenomena of the land through its seasonal cycles.

Jin Lee Wind #1

Jin Lee Wind #2

Jin Lee Wind #3

Pawel Fabjanski

Untitled

fabjanski.com

Pawan Fabjanski untitled

Pawan Fabjanski untitled

Pawan Fabjanski untitled

Pawan Fabjanski untitled

Pawan Fabjanski untitled

Tamara Dean

Ritualism

Ritual is a protocol, a guide, for that most fundamental of human needs: meaning. But when protocol loses meaning, snubbed out by the distractions of life, it is merely repetition. Baptism becomes bath, marriage a party with rings. And so on the Western world ambles, away from what was once the light, out into the secular unknown. One wonders, in this state, if bath can become baptism - if, on meditation, the mundane can take up meaning and repetition become ritual. This is the margin I seek to explore: the contemporary quest for purpose, rite in the Australian landscape. Ritualism delves into the shared desire to understand our existence and our mortality, the purpose ritual holds in explaining moments of life, to mark them and imbue them with meaning.

A flexible ribbed cord, a non-continuous light source (a strip light) long shutter speeds and quite a bit of patience combine together in my minimalist interpretation of the theme dance.

Justin Barton

Georgian DancersAt every opportunity I am invited to experience an expression of who and what these people have decided they are. Through dance, through song, through physical agility, through stories told over heavily laden tables, shared by whoever wants to listen. Displayed with ease, with pleasure, and with grace. It is, of course, a fantasy of sorts. And yet there is a kind of melancholia, an underbelly that almost inevitably sets itself against such exuberance. It is a place literally crumbling from the weight of such unsustainable romance.

On my return in 2008, after a summer at war with it’s powerful neighbour. I found my friends exhausted but very much alive, alive in a way that is only possible when one is so close to the possibility of death. I returned once more in the late spring of 2009, a little less than a year after this conflict I wanted to search for the people I felt most represented a flavour of this collective imagining, both theirs and at once mine. I chose dancers and pilgrims, guests at weddings, and young judo players, it is a work in progress and I must add to these portraits of human faces, a series of portraits of the land, the land that lies so close to the origin of their story telling.

Vanessa Winship

Connected

Hidden or overlooked perspectives on human beings relationships to their surrounding environment.

James Harris

Julia Fullerton-Batten

Old Father Thames

Since I moved to London on the banks of the River Thames from Germany thirty years ago, I have been intrigued by the river and its significance in British and world events. The history of the Thames is awash along its entire length with a myriad of stories encompassing birth, baptism, death, love, prostitution, art, traditions, riverside-scavenging youngsters, flooding, sun-bathing on the shore close to Tower Bridge, the story of the ‘Ladies Bridge’, and countless other whimsical, idiosyncratic and tragic happenings. I took up the cudgel to portray some of these photographically – “Old Father Thames” is the result.

In my project, I have chosen, investigated and photographed stories illustrating the unique characters and locales key to the waterway’s past. Each image in the collection is my personal account of how I view the river’s journey through the passage of time, and with it, that of our nation. The range of stories reveal a highly diverse patchwork of national, personal and community events.

Tower BridgeOn and off from the 18th Century until 1971, Londoners would sun-bathe on the Thames shore in the shadow of Tower Bridge. Because of the tidal nature of the Thames there, sun-bathing was limited to 3 to 4 hours.

Escaping the floodFlooding along the Thames was very commonplace at the beginning of the 20th Century. Those living on the banks of the Thames adopted stoic attitudes towards their occurrence and craft to negotiate flooded streets often using improvised craft to negotiate flooded streets.

Swan UppersSwan Upping is an English tradition from the Middle Ages still performed in July every year when swans on the Thames and their cygnets are counted, caught, weighed and ringed.

Ophelia Since the 12th Century, baptisms have been performed along the River Thames, even today on personal request.

BaptismA photographic reproduction of the famous painting by John Everett Millais, a famous English pre-Raphaelite painter. It shows Ophelia, having fallen from a tree into a river, singing and still holding a bunch of flowers that she had picked on the river bank, oblivious to any danger. Her clothes became saturated with water and she died.

Isabel M. Martinez

Quantum Blink (2011) According to quantum mechanics we have forty conscious moments per second, and our brains connect this sequence of nows to create the illusion of the flow of time. So, what would things look like if that itermittence was made visible? This body of work explores that hiccup, that blink, that ubiquitous fissure in the falling-into-place of things.

In my work I attempt to articulate something in between the freezing of time—that so often characterizes photography—and its relentless passing. I hint towards temporalities that are fluid, speculative, and somewhat loose. I am looking for the line that divides the finite (probability) from the infinite (possibility). If time is a succession of instants, I want to see what lies in between them. I am after the gaps between instants of consciousness.

The photographs in Quantum Blink are composed of two exposures taken instants apart. The striped pattern is the result of masks placed in-camera, this feature allows me to blend two images together and at the same time keep them from fully fusing onto one another. Each photograph in the series holds a brief sense of continuity, almost like an animation, slightly cinematographic. The portraits depict subjects performing mundane actions during moments of reflection and observation—however, though providing a notion of movement and progression, the beginning and end of those actions is ambiguous and indistinguishable.

In person, these photographic works appear to shift and change depending on the distance and the angle from which they are seen; an illusion of volume may become apparent, while other times it may seem as though there are three images at play.

Isabel M. Martinez from Quantum Blink

Isabel M. Martinez from Quantum Blink

Isabel M. Martinez from Quantum Blink

Isabel M. Martinez from Quantum Blink

Isabel M. Martinez from Quantum Blink

Katy Lopez

AfterWar is a story told in photographs of the children of Cazuca, a red zone on the outskirts of Bogota. Currently, it harbours the highest number of people fleeing from the civil war.

Unfortunately, Colombia has held a civil war during more than 55 years where hundreds of thousands of people have been killed. Besides, it is the second country with more internally displaced persons in the world (more than 6 million people).

The families of these children have been displaced from their homes because of violence and extreme poverty. These children are part of the end result of the war leading them to live in high vulnerability levels, which in turn, creates a cycle of violence in a supposed ‘AfterWar’ that seems never to stop.

His faces show a large spectrum of emotions varying from sadness and anger to joy and soulfulness. These children are lessons of resilience and are example to many that have everything.

I want to make you aware of the existence of these children in other part of the planet. They represent a wider problematic in the current world where more than 60 million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes.

Katy Lopez

Nixon

Katy Lopez

Ana Linda

Katy Lopez

Elvira

Katy Lopez

Lucia

Katy Lopez

Jose

Katy Lopez

Paula

Katy Lopez

Kevin

Final Project Concept Presentation

• For next week, prepare a short 5 minute presentation detailing your concept for your final project. Please describe the following:

• What you are going to shoot

• How you are going to shoot it (i.e. documentary style, in the studio, in color, in black and white, photomontage, etc.)

• Your ideas for locations and/or models for your shoot

• Please provide digital images to help visually describe the look you are going for. This can be shooting style, color palette, subject matter, etc.